A hideous story from the troubled border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. I’ll quote a few passages.
Saudi policemen burned 18 Yemenis while they were trying to cross into Khamis Bani Mushait, a Saudi village bordering Yemen. Alsahwa opposition newspaper reported on Saturday that the police poured diesel onto the men, who were hiding in a hole in the area to escape the police.
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The 18 burnt men were transferred to a police station. They said police interrogated them while they shouted in pain. “They questioned us quietly and with indifferent temperament,” Salloum said.
After four hours of interrogation, they were taken to the civil hospital, where they were left with Philippine doctors for many days. The doctors changed their bandages every four days, which made their injuries worse.
After nine days in the hospital, the 18 burn victims were taken back to the police station and the officer offered them two choices; either to go back to Yemen and write waivers and confessions that the Saudi police weren’t responsible for what happened to them or to stay in Saudi Arabia till they died.
It is difficult to tell what is the greatest horror in the story- the obscene cruelty or the wanton indifference; the lack of any human compassion or the clinical and legalistic way in which punishment and cover-up was inflicted. This is the kind of story that leaves one with a shudder of terror and a quick desire to forget.
But this is not a philosophical blog, nor is it a forum to peer into the dark crevasses of man’s soul (for which we can all breathe a sigh of relief). There are reasons why such a scenario happened, and will continue to happen, if hopefully not to the dark extreme as above.
Why were the men there? As the Yemen Times said, the “illegal immigrants were trying to get jobs in the Saudi bordering cities”.
Ah! So simple, so obvious, and yet such a depth of history and desire and humanity and the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the region.
The Yemen/Saudi border is a Durand Line drawn in shifting sands. The border was only recently demarcated, and just this year a wall has been going up. Yemen and Saudi Arabia have fought bitterly over the divide, in what seemed to be just as pointless a battle over wasted land as the recent Ethiopian/Eritrean wars. But, like those African conflicts, the border was more of an excuse to air past and present grievances. From the above link:
In many respects, the Yemen-Saudi border dispute was never exclusively about borders, however, but was a dispute which could be invoked when relations between the two countries were hostile. Tensions between Yemen and Saudi Arabia were more likely to provoke clashes along the disputed border than be caused by such clashes.
Current political tensions do not rest easy in lands unused to lines. In many ways, this line is little different than the one separating Pashtuns in South Asia, or Kurds throughout the Middle East. Yes, they mean something, but they are, ultimately, fake black lines that exist only on paper. They distort reality, in two ways. They give a fake picture of what is on the ground, but they also actually distort the real world- these lines, as Pynchon knows, twist allegiances, make for awkward overlaps, and in the Middle East, contort ancient history into a confusing patchwork that often makes sense only in Getrude Bell’s inelegant quilting. These borders often mean little- they have fluidity but not its attendant grace.
Yes, but…a nation-state needs borders, and people need a nation-state in the current economy. But what if the state is, like Yemen, incapable of competing or even staying afloat in the modern world? People will flee and seek other opportunities. And that is where the Yemeni burn victims met indifferent Filipino doctors.
The mono-economy of Saudi Arabia demands workers to fill other roles, and, like its Gulf neighbors, imports immigrants from around the world. But not from its poor Arab neighbor, with whom it has a host of problems. The border is used here as a bludgeon, as Saudi Arabia tried to balance the needs of its doomed economy with its realpolitikrole as enforcer of the Peninsula.
All this is untenable. Saudi Arabia needs to recognize that it can’t afford to let its neighbor to the south transform into a failed state. It has to realize that ties go deeper than the dawn of the House of Saud. If it doesn’t, it is doomed to repeating the cross-border horrorshows that ignore both humanity and its dreamiest creations.